Ecce Sigum

Author: John Winkelman

  • I Live…Again

    I have my life back. The giant time-and-energy-sucking project was handed off yesterday, so I rewarded myself by spending the entire day playing around with Flash MX. The drawing API is a thing of wonder and beauty. Using the mutated Rose trigonometry formula from my first Flash 5 showpiece I created this thing , of which I am rather proud.

    Received a notice from Amazon that they are processing my order for A New Kind of Science. I suspect that there will be a great many things in it which will be the basis for a great many future Flash experiments. If reading the book doesn’t make me so smart I transcend the flesh I may post a few.

  • The Tuva Appreciation Post

    So I have spent all of this week listening to the extraordinary music of two bands from Tuva, deep in the steppes of Russia: Huun Huur Tu and Ya-Kha. Of the two, Yat-Kha is my favorite, they bill themselves as “Tuvan punk” … sort of. Imagine the polytonal throat-singing generally associated with Tibetan Buddhist chanting, then add traditional east European music, with the occasional electric guitar or synthesizer. But heck: Don’t just take my word for it; you can hear it at CDNOW .

    In other news, I have learned some more things about XSLT which will make the maintenance of this site even easier than I thought. This may allow for breaking the XML into individual pieces, one per journal entry, thus making it possible to bookmark, save, and send each individual entry.

    I am nearly finished with Blood Meridian . The writing is beautiful, but the subject is so terribly ugly. I feel a sustained sense of awe while reading it.

  • The Post-Apocalyptic 1800s

    Have finished Son of the Morning Star. Now working on Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I am 60 pages into this beautiful, hellish book, and I know, I just KNOW, that when I finish I will wish I had never read it, so I could discover it, again, for the first time. Consider this excerpt, in which a group of men are traveling through the southwestern desert:

    “That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses’ trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geography was not stone but fear.”

    Again, when I re-create my book page, I will post a small review.

  • Putting Away Childish Things

    Well, it’s official. I just put up a placeholder/redirect page at www.eccesignum.com , directing wayward surfers here. I had es.com for two years, through six major and numerous minor iterations. From Photoshop crimes through amazing cross-browser Javascript hacks, to building serious Cascading Style Sheet mojo, to Flash experiments, to this: a full dynamic website.

    All that stuff is gone. I have a lot of it stored locally, but I doubt if I will post it, except perhaps in another year or so when I am feeling nostalgic.

    In another year no-one will bother to browser-check for Netscape 4, except in the most rabidly conservative shops. If I were my own boss, providing NS4 compatibility would automatically raise the cost of a project by 25%. Just to make the page work. To make it look good would add another 25% to both the cost and the time necessary to complete the project. Dammit!

    But that is all water under the bridge. My next two projects for es.o: a content management system, and a fully functioning Flash version, using the same XML you are currently viewing.

  • Once More Into the Breach

    Er, hello… I am so grateful to see so many of you have braved the weather to be here tonight. I have put a lot of work into the latest round of my site. Amusing and informing the public is the noblest of causes. Or was that True Love? No matter…

    Why did I rebuild my site? Pure, bone-deep laziness. The less work I have to do to maintain this theng, the better. So I learned a little XML, and little XSL, a little PHP, and a little Javascript, and viola ! All I need to worry about is the words.

    And why the change from .com to .org? No good reason, really. This site is a past-time… a pursuit… a hobby. A place to collect my thoughts and inflict them on the viewing public. I am a professional at work. Here… I am Your Host.

    (sound of crickets chirping)

    Hello?

  • Pre-launch Blathering

    I built ECCESIGNUM using a combination of XML, XSL and PHP on the back end, and XHTML and CSS2 on the front. Thus I have a site which I can change completely by modifying two files: the XSL stylesheet and the CSS stylesheet. One for structure and one for presentation. The XML file contains all of the information necessary for markup and structure, so I could, in theory, have a choose-your-preferences panel which would allow the user to set up combinations of preferences which would make the site look completely different from one user to another.

    So now I have to go through and re-create the rest of the site in XML. The largest of the files (the archives) went together smoothly, and the rest await inspiration.

    We at BBK Studio have been busy enough that I can hardly bear the sight of code or mark-up at the end of the day. We are meeting handoff deadlines at the rate of about two a week, a feat not easily matched in the web development world.

    So to take my mind off of computers I have been reading Son of the Morning Star by Evan Connell. I may post a review when I have finished grokking. I can tell you this, though: Custer was an extraordinary individual, with a temperament and sensibilities more in line with East European nobility than with the men he commanded.

  • Hunkering Down

    Me again. My life is still mad busy, and I am plugging away at the design for the new ECCESIGNUM, launching May 1, or thereabouts.

    I got all I could out of the Memetics book. After the first six or so chapters it becomes Applied Memetics, which is less interesting to me than the concept of memetics. So I have set the book aside, just in time to dive into AI Game Programming Wisdom, which shipped today and should be here early next week. Yes, I want to program games.

    Updates will (obviously) be infrequent until the relaunch.

  • Holograph

    Hello. I’ve missed you all.

    Two important announcements: First, at the end of April…and possibly before… this site will be reborn as www.eccesignum.org . Don’t bother looking; there is nothing there yet. And second, I am playing around with Flash MX, and it is a super-duper wondrous geeky toy. So when (if?) I have any time, I will be posting new experiments.

    I want to take a moment to give Mad Props to the ubermensch at Modwest , who will be hosting the new incarnation of this car-crash of a website.

  • Malfunction

    Today I was laid low by a visual migraine. If you have never had one of these, it feels like what I imagine a stroke feels like. Severe headache. Brilliant, beautiful, fractured light pattern somewhere in the field of vision. Information coming in from eyes doesn’t quite make it to the cognitive centers of the brain. Short-term visual memory goes kaput. I couldn’t process what I was reading, and couldn’t see the mouse cursor on my monitor.

    My first visual migraine scared the hell out of me. I didn’t know what it was and thought I had just suffered some form of brain damage. After an hour or so in a dark, quiet room, it went away. This time, it turned into a full-blown migraine which I currently have in check with massive amounts of powerful medication.

    If this sounds familiar, there is a better description here , and over here is a drawing of what it looks like from the inside.

    Maybe I should make a Flash demo of a visual migraine… when this one ends.

  • Small Minds

    GEARS!

    Six months ago we all grew up a little.

    A friend of mine recently told me that the owner of the graphic design company he worked for, made comments which I feel are pretty much typical of Americans when they think no-one is looking: After the first tower came down, Mr. Owner told his employees to come up with patriotic flag-covered t-shirt designs, because sales of flag covered shit always go up after events like 9-11. And, he said to print the designs on the cheap shirts because people will buy any old ratty shirt as long as it has a flag on it.

    That friend quit a few days later.

    Carrying around a flag makes you a good American in about the same way going to church makes you a good Christian. In other words, it really, ultimately, means nothing.